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1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to color translation for computer applications and more particularly to translating the color property of an operating system-based object into a format usable by a web-based application.
2. Description of the Related Art
Network management has experienced explosive growth and become a fundamental part of network infrastructure. Network management is essentially a set of tools and processes that enables one to control, monitor, and troubleshoot a network. A network manager typically uses standalone or integrated network management software to collect and process management data from the network.
One of the functions served by a network management software is the monitoring (or health polling) and notification of the state of various network devices. The state of a monitored device is reported, for example, as an entry in an event log dialog box. However, as the use of network systems has grown, so too has the size of the networks. Todays networks typically include large numbers of network devices. To provide a manageable interface, the network management software has been configured to report only notable aspects of the network or a particular network device. For example, reporting has been restricted to report only certain changes in the state of a particular device. The network conditions or events which trigger this type of restricted reporting are typically referred as network or device alarms.
An alarm is the mechanism used to identify a notable event occurring on the network, such as a change in the state of a device. Specifically an alarm differentiates the notable event from normal network operation. To further streamline reporting performed by network management software, a number of different alarm settings have been used. Specifically, an alarm event type has been used to represent a type of condition, for example a threshold, the occurrence of which may be a notable network event. In addition, differing alarm severities have been used to represent importance levels of an occurrence of a particular alarm event type. A particular alarm severity is typically based on the relative importance assigned, usually by a network administrator, to the alarm or the monitored device. The corresponding alarm severity class depends on the extent to which the threshold had been exceeded. For example, an occurrence of an event only slightly exceeding an alarm event threshold is represented by a xe2x80x9cminorxe2x80x9d alarm, while an event greatly exceeding the threshold is represented by a xe2x80x9ccriticalxe2x80x9d alarm. In addition, an xe2x80x9cinformationalxe2x80x9d alarm severity class has been established to provide information for devices not exceeding normal operating conditions.
A number of alarm event and alarm severity combinations may be active. Alarm severity classes, for example, have included cleared (or informational), indeterminate, minor, major and critical alarm classes. To assist the user in distinguishing between the various alarm severity, color coded entries have been used. Event log entries having an alarm contain a field having the color that is associated with the particular alarm. A monitored device having an alarm with a xe2x80x9ccriticalxe2x80x9d severity has typically been assigned a red state color. A critical severity indicates that the state of a device has greatly exceeded normal operating conditions, such as dropping or losing large amounts of data. Alternatively, a monitored device having an alarm with a xe2x80x9cclearedxe2x80x9d severity has been typically assigned a green state color. A cleared severity indicates a device responded to its last health poll. To provide maximum flexibility for user preferences, the alarm severity colors may be capable of modification by a user.
Briefly, according to the present invention, a remote web-based application or interface is able to accurately reproduce, for a network device, state color information received from a server side (or operating system-based) application. The color reproduction techniques are independent of the specific state color being reproduced. Specifically, a translator interprets the state color information as discrete color components representing the intensity of each color component forming the entire color object. Next, this raw color component information is converted to a form compatible with the display requirements of the web-based (or web browser side) application. Since the color translation or conversion is independent of the particular state color being reproduced, automatic transfer of the appropriate state color format is achieved across a network connection without hard coding of approximate web-based color equivalents.
In addition, in accordance with the present invention, object color combinations are automatically adjusted to achieve a suitable color contrast for color objects including both text (or foreground) and background. In particular, upon translation of a first color object from a network device into a format for use by the web-based application, a second color object is calculated to approximate a numerical value closely equivalent to a color object opposite of the first color object. Specifically, once a background color object is translated, a predetermined dark text color or a predetermined light text color is chosen by determining which of the two numerical values is closer to a numerical value representing a color attribute opposite that of the background color attribute.